


New Birth

by aperture_living



Category: BioShock, BioShock Infinite
Genre: Drabble, Drama, Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-07
Updated: 2013-05-07
Packaged: 2017-12-10 15:32:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/787622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aperture_living/pseuds/aperture_living
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To him, April nineteenth didn’t hold the wonder it once did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	New Birth

**Author's Note:**

> All the spoilers! Every single one of them!

To him, April nineteenth didn’t hold the wonder it once did.

When he was young, there was an excitement for the coming day, a promise of playing out in the sunshine before having his favorite dinner cooked and expectantly laid for him. Sometimes, the winter still clung stubbornly on, a last grip before it relaxed and decomposed into dark memories, but more often than not it would be warm enough to run around with only the lightest of coats. The grass would be soft, mushy in some places, and mud would have crawled to his knees before he came back in, only half-guilty as he tracked it all along wooden floors, earning him half-hearted admonishment.

When he was older, April nineteenth was about going out for drinks, both with his friends and by himself, staggering home with clouded memories and a hangover that could take down a buffalo the next day. And even though he was a young man, he enjoyed it, touted it, looked forward to another year of vomiting off on the side of the beaten path home.

Then Wounded Knee happened. Then it _all_ happened.

April nineteenth didn’t hold the same taste for him anymore, was just another measly twenty-four hours that he worked through, that he prayed through, that he guided and aided his searching people through. He would avoid the calendar, would avoid the cabinet, would do nothing outside of what his religious fervor allotted him to embrace. Thanking God for this life. This station. This privilege and this duty to keep his streets clean and safe and away from the Sodom Below.

Protecting his lamb while herding his foolish, dependent sheep.

No, his new birthday, the one he shared, the one he told people, was the one where the follies of man were drowned and the absolute grace was born. Where Booker died, and his sins, his kills became necessary, guided by the hand of God Himself, a required purging of a lesser people. Where he wasn’t a savage, a weapon, but a hero worthy of statues and halls and legends. A dream. An idol. An aspiration.

God’s Gift to all, a prophet by design.

After all, Zachary Hale Comstock wasn’t given life until he was drawing breath from His Father’s water, until the day the baptism birthed him again. And that was the only birthday that truly mattered.


End file.
